This paper tests whether traders react more strongly as a series of similar earnings surprises continues, as predicted by several important behavioral finance models. We compile measures of buying and selling from NYSE TAQ data for a large ten-year sample. Results show strong, consistent, evidence that small traders exhibit an increasing reaction – with significant increases in reaction strengt...

Financial reporting and disclosure are potentially important means for management to communicate firm performance and governance to outside investors. We provide a framework for analyzing managers’ reporting and disclosure decisions in a capital markets setting, and identify key research questions. We then review current empirical research on disclosure regulation, information intermediaries, a...

This paper develops and analyzes a model in which tax considerations and financial reporting considerations have countervailing effects on a firm’s investments in internally developed intangible assets. It also proposes and estimates a new measure of tax preferences, which we call the economic effective tax rate. This measure reflects both investments in intangible assets and the use of debt fi...

The sharp distinction drawn between firms rated narrowly above (BBB–) and below (BB+) the investment-grade cutoff provides variation in debt financing availability unrelated to firm fundamentals. We exploit this market segmentation to identify an asymmetric effect of debt capital supply on voluntary disclosure: BB+ firms step up disclosure in response to high-yield bond mutual fund outflows. Th...

This study provides exploratory evidence on auditors’ framing and evaluation of hypotheses, identifies implications for improving audit decision-making and facilitates the interpretation of prior research. Prior studies usually assume hypotheses to be framed as mutually exclusive and exhaustive. However, both verbal protocol evidence and probability assessments reveal that in a realistic case m...

Managers, consultants, and the financial press assert that compensation plans based on residual income change managers’ behavior. This assertion is empirically tested by selecting a sample of firms that began using a residual income performance measure in their compensation plans and comparing their performance to a control sample of firms that continue to use traditional accounting earnings-ba...

I find evidence consistent with managers manipulating real activities to avoid reporting annual losses. Specifically, I find evidence suggesting price discounts to temporarily increase sales, overproduction to report lower cost of goods sold, and reduction of discretionary expenditures to improve reported margins. Cross-sectional analysis reveals that these activities are less prevalent in the ...

This study examines whether institutional investors’ voting for All-Star financial analysts is affected by analyst beauty. Using a sample of 1,135 U.S. analysts and controlling for analyst performance, we document that beauty, on average, does not affect the outcome of All-Star analyst voting. However, a beauty premium emerges in those sectors where there is high information asymmetry on analys...

This paper examines the relation between annual report readability and firm performance and earnings persistence. I measure the readability of public company annual reports using the Fog index from the computational linguistics literature and the length of the document. I find that: (1) the annual reports of firms with lower earnings are harder to read (i.e., they have a higher Fog index and ar...